When the Heart Turns Wild

She roams wild nightin watercolors paintedwith the brush of autumn’s chill.
He doesn’t know her name…Where she lives…Or if she is even real.She is a ghost beyond his curtainsthat makes him blush likea fourteen-year-old boy.
He’s not sure why he chose to buya house with land the size of a churchparking lot, but if hell has a Bible,it hoodwinked him into weakness. 
Everything around him had been abandoned,turned to rust and rot, and broken windowsthat winked every time he traveled past themto reach his driveway haunted with silhouettesof tree limbs pasted on the pavement by the moon. 
It was early October when he first sawthe ethereal beauty walking among thefrost bitten roses of his garden. 
She appeared to be talking to an owlwho sat immobile on a fence postso enraptured it didn’t budge whenhe opened the back door. 
Startled like a skittish kitten, sheescaped into the shadows, and nowooing of his voice could lureher from her seclusion.
He stood at his window for weekswaiting for night to drink the lastwine of sunset, hoping, praying as if he were a newborn convert climbingout of baptismal water, she’d return. 
Then on the last night before winterwould break morning’s horizon shewalked out of the ebony to standbeneath a lantern he’d placed on a post as if it were a lighthouseto bring a ship safely to the shore. 
He watched her standing, staringback at him wearing a dressso sheer he could see the pink of her flesh flirting from beneath it.
He tried to hold the stare, not blink,but he couldn’t stop his eyes from closing.In that tiniest eyelash of time, she disappeared.
A hundred questions wrestled with his sanity.She’s real...She’s not real…She’s real…He concluded it didn’t matter. After alllove was insanity, a risking of a heart notknowing if it can remain whole. 
He wasn’t sure if tomorrow winterwould steal her from him or she was a waif of Autumn who wouldreturn when the oak dipped leaves in orange. 
What he knew, if she was real, he wouldn’twant to tame her. She had awakened the wild,the fragile, the bold in him. Love had brought freedom. 
©Susie Clevenger 2025
Shay's Word Garden Word List ~ Bittersweet